Scientists 'record' magnetic breakthrough

Posted on 7 February 2012

An international team of scientists has demonstrated a revolutionary new way of magnetic recording which will allow information to be processed hundreds of times faster than by current hard drive technology.

The
researchers found they could record information using only heat – a previously
unimaginable scenario. They believe this discovery will not only make future
magnetic recording devices faster, but more energy-efficient too.

The
results of the research, which was led by the University of York’s Department
of Physics, are reported in the February edition of Nature Communications.

York
physicist Thomas Ostler said: “Instead of using a magnetic field to record
information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces
and recorded information using only heat. This revolutionary method allows the recording
of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of
times faster than present hard drive technology. As there is no need for a
magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption.”

The
multinational team of scientists included researchers from Spain, Switzerland,
Ukraine, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. Experimental work was carried out
at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute
of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Radboud University Nijmegen,
Netherlands.

This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology

Thomas Ostler

Dr
Alexey Kimel, from the Institute of Molecules and Materials, Radboud University
Nijmegen, said: “For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy
the magnetic order. Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact,
be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium.”

Modern
magnetic recording technology employs the principle that the North pole of a
magnet is attracted to the South pole of another and two like poles repulse. Until
now it has been believed that in order to record one bit of information – by inverting
the poles of a magnet – there was a need to apply an external magnetic field.
The stronger the applied field, the faster the recording of a magnetic bit of
information.

However,
the team of scientists has demonstrated that the positions of both the North
and South poles of a magnet can be inverted by an ultrashort heat pulse, harnessing
the power of much stronger internal forces of magnetic media.

Notes to editors:

The
paper “Ultrafast heating as a sufficient stimulus for magnetization
reversal in a ferrimagnet” is published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, 7 February. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1666

The research team included
scientists from University of York; the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales
de Madrid, Spain; Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland; College of Science
and Technology, Nihon University, Japan; Institute of Magnetism, Kiev, Ukraine;
the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Russia; Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Molecules and
Materials, Netherlands.

The work was partially supported by de Nederlandse Organisatie voor
Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NanoSci-E+ program, Foundation for Fundamental
Research and the Technology Foundation; the Russian Foundation for Basic
Research, the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme, the
Spanish MICINN project and the European Research Council under the
European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme.